OGC seeks comments on Land Information Domain Working Group charter

13 September 2012 - The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC®) announces the
formation of a new OGC Land Information Domain Working Group (Land Info DWG) to
address CAD, Land Information System (LIS) and Geographic Information System
(GIS) interoperability challenges facing industry domains concerned with the
built environment.

Organizations and individuals throughout the
architecture/engineering/construction (AEC) industry need to be able to
exchange detailed civil and survey engineering data within that industry. They,
and others in fields as diverse as environmental sciences and location
marketing, also need to be able use such data with geospatial data and
geospatial applications. In general, geospatial systems have evolved from
requirements for observation and analysis, whereas land information systems
have evolved from requirements for design and legal property description.

To meet this data exchange need, over the past 10 years a group of
volunteer organizations and individuals developed the LandXML model and
associated XML schema. LandXML is a non-proprietary standard for data exchange
among the land development, civil engineering and surveying communities. Over
70 registered software products support LandXML, and many organizations around
the world, such as the Australian Department of Lands, the Federal Aviation
Administration (FAA) and the US Army Corps of Engineers, rely on LandXML as a
data exchange format for mission critical activities.

The goals of the Land Information DWG are to find the best approach for
incorporating the LandXML schema into the OGC’s standards base and to explore ways
to incorporate land related information into OGC standards. This is the first
time the OGC membership is tackling comprehensive integration of survey, civil
engineering, and other land based data stored in CAD and GIS databases. This
new work complements a legacy of activities in the OGC dating from the CAD-GIS
DWG (now the 3DIM DWG), the CityGML Standards
Working Group (CityGML SWG), and other OGC DWGs and SWGs.

The OGC is an international consortium of more than 460 companies,
government agencies, research organizations, and universities participating in
a consensus process to develop publicly available geospatial standards. OGC
standards support interoperable solutions that "geo-enable" the Web,
wireless and location-based services, and mainstream IT. OGC standards empower
technology developers to make geospatial information and services accessible
and useful with any application that needs to be geospatially enabled. Visit
the OGC website at http://www.opengeospatial.org/contact.